Joan Fontcuberta was precisely immersed in visiting photographic archives around the world in search of images deteriorated by the action of light or fungi when the Liceu proposed that he become the fourth artist who, music not being his discipline, dialogues in the Rambla theater with Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. The photographer, visual artist and essayist from Barcelona has been busy for some time in those phantasmagoria that mark his latest works and that also constitute a poetic exercise on the degradation of memory. Something that connects in a very special way with this cycle of 24 poetic songs that Schubert composed in 1828 based on poems by Wilhelm Müller and that can be seen for one day only at the Liceu, in the large room. It will be on Friday, February 23, with baritone Michael Volle and piano by Helmut Deutsch.
Unlike the readings of the Winterreise made in previous seasons by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, the Preljocaj Ballet, Antonio López (between the bars of La Model) or, previously, William Kentridge at the Palau de la Música Catalana, Fontcuberta faces this key work in the history of music establishing a parallel between that walker who abandons himself to the sadness of heartbreak and the Alzheimer’s patient who loosens the ties of memory.
It so happens that Fontcuberta has had two painful experiences with close cases of Alzheimer’s that “have hurt me, they have impressed me; I have experienced it with a lot of drama and surely that leads me to translate it into things I am doing,” he explains. That’s why I thought of a Winterreise in which the common thread, despite respecting the prominence of music and poetry, “intensifies from a background the feeling of melancholy or the idea of ??agony, that path towards loneliness and Darkness”.
Only in this case, he continues, this melancholy and sadness are not given, as in the poem, by the loss of a love, but by letting go of memories that fade. “And not so much because memory has its deficiencies, but because many times this loss of contact with the world is caused by degenerative memory pathologies.”
The young wanderer in Müller’s poems would give rise, in this new imaginary, and as he is expelled from society – even the dog throws him out of his bed – to that character who suffers a deterioration of his memory and lives with anguish the uncertainty about whether that memory is real, the artist points out. And like Schubert’s protagonist, he finds in death a sweet escape from his despair.
A cyclorama with the work of Fontcuberta frames this semi-staged proposal in which the stage director Anna Ponces uses an actor and two actresses: he is that character with Alzheimer’s, the alter ego of the baritone. They are the wife and the caregiver. “The characters,” he points out, “are more realistic, while the voice of the poems and the singer represent the mental world of the protagonist’s pain, his inner confusions throughout that journey in which he sees himself from the outside.” says Ponces.
The proposal is interdisciplinary and has a third guest, the poet Susanna Rafart (Ripoll, 1962), poet in residence at the Liceu, who has written the poems that accompany the show for the occasion. Taking as a basis those of Müller and the abstraction of Fontcuberta’s work and the fragmented vision that people who suffer from this deterioration have of reality, Rafart creates a symbolic universe about romantic abandonment and madness.
“Encountering Müller’s poems was a challenge. Heinrich Heine considered him the great modernizer of popular poetry and a fresh language. We start from here and the final poem, Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder), to which no one pays attention, the a solitary artist, who is on the run, who no one wants to listen to, who is not loved and who goes through so many states.
The closing of the circle makes this Fontcubertian Winterreise one more coincidence. Invited by the Italian Ministry of Culture to search their photographic archives to create his own project, Fontcuberta asked to have access to the material in poor condition, which they were already about to discard.
“That made me think about how a device paradoxically conceived to record great historical events, portraits of public figures, etc… gave rise to phantasmagoria. Fungi invade memory and eat it, giving rise to a superposition of landscapes : that of reality that is attacked by that landscape of bacteria that feed on the organic components of the gelatin in the photograph,” adds the photographer.
And he was lucky enough to find a box with photographs of stereoscopic landscapes of the Alps that had been taken by Prince Francesco Chigi Albani della Rovere, an aristocrat, military man and politician, but who as a young man was a great dilettante of photography and mountaineering, of So at the turn of the century he took many images of the Alpine landscape.
“That legacy was donated by his family to the national archives upon his death in 1953, although precisely the part of the landscape photo suffered the inclemency of the flood, giving rise to that type of absolutely magical landscape in which there is an almost cosmic dust, sidereal: we come from dust and return to dust. And for those of us who have a background in art history, it refers us to Duchamp’s Élevage de poussière (The Dust Farm), that masterpiece of modernity that changed the direction of contemporary art. and let the dust settle on a glass plate as a symbol of passing time, abandonment, loneliness, etc… as in Winterreise.”
It came in handy to represent Schubert’s cycle. What’s more, using artificial intelligence they have recreated what would have been portraits of the protagonists of this production, the baritone Volle and the actress who plays his wife… and You will see them with their faces perfectly fitted in alpine portraits of couples from the mid-20th century.
